Quotes About Progress

In many ways, we are the city that the New Deal built. Because that's who built all of our infrastructure. Before that, we were a hardscrabble town.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

You travel faster alone, but farther together.

If you don't ask why, you'll never be attacked or criticized. No one is going to go after you or your family. But if you don't ask why, nothing, not a damn thing, is ever going to change. I think that's the difference between philanthropy and activism. Philanthropy is this kind of life-saving work. Activism is when you ask why this work needs to be done in the first place.

The pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it.

Progress is not inevitable. It's up to us to create it.

I'm trying to change the culture in New York City that's hard enough!

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It's not politically viable it's not morally right it's just not going to happen.

If you really believe that you're making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets - not to have a fair fight.

I don't believe that government is good at picking technology, particularly technology that is changing. By the time you get it done and go through democracy, it's so outdated.

They had inherited a poor, patriarchal, and formal society, and turned it into a rich, feminist, and fiercely egalitarian one.

The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.

Sport is about acceleration, not top speed.

Anything that liberates is not without risk.

The second decade of the twenty-first century—just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868—we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression.

The progress of LGBT rights is often directly tied to—sometimes through indirect routes—multiple fights for human dignity and freedom.

It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country

It took more paper than ever to support the paperless society.

And in that full day, while Jed slept and woke and worked and loved, the forces in the world around him rushed headlong toward an inevitable, and violent, climax.

within every technological advancement lie the seeds of tyranny and slavery.

There are more people now with wireless connections than with flush toilets, according to the United Nations (2013).

Over time, the system will get better as long as people aren't introducing duplication behind your back. If they are, you can take steps with them short of physical violence, but that is another issue.

we can't let "best" be the enemy of "better.

It's a lesson in life—don't look back, you'll trip over.